During the height of the “pandemic” insanity when people were walking around double and triple masked, I was amazed by how quickly friends, relatives, and neighbors bought into the COVID narrative and joined the army of willing participants, a behavioral phenomenon referred to by clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet as “mass formation,” a phrase that spread like wildfire and soon morphed into “mass formation psychosis.”

In New York City, I encountered a number of compliant zombies—total strangers masked almost to their eyebrows—walking ten to fifteen feet around me while hurling profanities at me for choosing to go maskless. It was around this time that Major League Baseball had taken social distancing to a new level. At Citi Field, the NY Mets—real live, flesh-and-blood baseball players—sweated out nine innings to rows of seats filled with life-sized cardboard cutouts featuring pictures of diehard fans who actually paid to have their cutout image seated in the stadium. I watched one game on television and thought I had accidentally tuned into a rerun episode of The Twilight Zone until I concluded that even Rod Serling couldn’t make this shit up.

As we approach 2025, “The Big Apple”—the once culturally vibrant and fairly safe metropolis dubbed “Fun City” back in the 1960s—is promising to turn into Mad Max on steroids. Here we are, four years after the soulless cabal of medical gangsters rolled out COVID-19, witnessing unprecedented levels of crime not only in urban centers but on the manicured tree-lined streets and in the shopping malls of suburbia where nothing is off limits: drug dealers; organized gangs of shoplifters; stickups; carjackings; assaults, murders; home invasions; abductions; child trafficking; you name it.

Ironically, New York City and State government officials and legislators including Governor Kathy Hochul and NYC Mayor Eric Adams are now voicing support for legislation enacting mask bans. That’s right—no more masks. On Long Island, Nassau County has already enacted a broad mask ban, and Ballston Spa, New York passed its own mask ban targeting protestors.

Why the sudden change? Unfortunately, this reversal in thinking didn’t come about because they went off script and actually conducted their own research and understood the utter uselessness and health risks associated with wearing a face mask. It’s because criminals—many repeat offenders with a rap sheet longer than I-95—have adopted face masks as the personal attire of choice to complement the ever-popular peekaboo hoodie. Worn together, this allows lawbreakers to evade detection by any one of New York’s twelve zillion security cameras. (Jeez! Who could ever have predicted THAT?)

Either way, it’s a no-win for all. Whether face masks are mandated or banned, our sovereign right to make our own personal health decisions is violated.

In 2021, I started writing short poems, an outlet to express my feelings and preserve my sanity. Below is one of them.

Beyond Words

today I passed you
on the sidewalk
awkwardly
you looked at me
alarmed and fearful
I
immediately understood
your true feelings
deeply troubled and confused
we both
spoke with our eyes
desperately trying to navigate
the raging sea of face masks
all
s–o–c–i–a–l–l–y – ↔ – d–i–s–t–a–n–c–e–d
self-censored
locked down
emotionally quarantined
deafening the silent chorus
of collective paranoia
imbued with a newfound sense
of self-serving designer moralism
does anyone know that
I secretly longed to cradle your cheeks
and kiss you tenderly?
please forgive me
I am weak and sadly human
not now
but maybe someday
we shall meet once again
whole and alone
naked of fear
in a sacred holy place
where
there is
no darkness